The Scary Parallels Between 2016 and 1860

Has
there ever been an election like this? One in which opponents
called for a candidate’s assassination, swore they would “never
permit” the winner’s inauguration, and urged that their allies
grab a “shot gun or pistol” and prepare for “revolution”?

Actually,
yes: the candidate was Abraham Lincoln, and parallels with 1860
illuminate our current democratic crisis.

When
Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House, the
United States was a “white man’s country,” as many a politician
proclaimed. They literally meant man
as well as white.
Property restrictions on the franchise had fallen away in the 1820s
and 1830s; after reaching age 21, almost all white men could vote.
This American system of “manhood suffrage” endured almost a
century before a national women’s suffrage amendment passed in
1920. In this, the United States differed starkly from most other
industrialized nations. England, for example, retained property
restrictions on men’s ballots until 1918. The act that enfranchised
British women gave the vote to five million non-propertied men at the
same time.

In
Lincoln’s election, Democrats implicated both race and gender in
their call to protect “manhood rights” from federal intrusion.
They opposed, of course, the Republican Party’s effort to limit
slavery in newly acquired federal territories—a future threat to
slaveholding interests. Meanwhile, also, five northern states
had extended “manhood suffrage” to African Americans.
Lincoln’s fiercest opponents, South and North, denounced the
spectacle of black men voting and argued that any such participation
negated the results. As the New
York Herald
warned, the Republican Party’s rise cast “doubt of the right of
the white man to rule.”

Secessionists’
virulent reaction precipitated the Civil War, over 700,000 deaths,
and Emancipation—a reminder that extreme challenges to the
political system can bring both catastrophe and revolutionary
change. During Reconstruction, amid struggles to restore white
men’s rule, Republican leaders in the South were beaten, shot,
hung, and even in one case beheaded. Democrats’ armed seizure
of state governments was accompanied by a broad, effective
disinformation campaign, blaming violence on the expansion of
democracy itself. That myth endures: a widely used AP
textbook still depicts Southern Reconstruction governments as
“bayonet-backed regimes,” rather than governments elected by
multiracial coalitions of voters. It also glosses over the
violence used to oust them, informing students merely that after
Union troops left, power “passed back into the hands of white
Redeemers.”

Elites
bought the myth, concluding that universal male suffrage had been a
mistake. It meant a “government of ignorance and vice,” as
Charles Francis Adams Jr. claimed, if those who could vote included a
“Celtic [Irish] proletariat on the Atlantic coast, an African
proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on
the Pacific.” Self-styled reformers won passage of onerous
new literacy requirements and registration hurdles to ensure that the
“best men” ruled. Those restrictions endured through the
so-called Progressive Era and the New Deal, restricting the scope and
impact of twentieth-century social welfare initiatives. Many remain
stubbornly in place today, dampening voter registration and
participation.

Though
reactionaries no longer denounce the power of the “Celtic
proletariat,” we have yet to vanquish the legacy of white men’s
democracy—the American political system’s long history of racial
disfranchisement, and also its century-long exclusion of women.
The political uses of petty patriarchy are evident in Donald Trump,
Jr.’s circulation of a map showing “Trump momentum,” which
turned out to illustrate the results of polling only male voters.
On one level that’s fantasy; on another it’s history. The
mindset that men’s votes are the ones that matter was, for
generations, writ in law. Among many remarkable challenges to that
order is the likely double whammy of a Black president and a
consecutive
white woman chief executive—with Michelle Obama’s eloquence
suggesting that we need not wait much longer for a woman of color to
lead.

The
implications of this revolutionary moment are as yet unclear.
In 2016, with the nation winding down major conflicts in Afghanistan
and Iraq and U.S. special forces fighting in Mosul, it’s worth
remembering that we vote in the shadow of war. The aftermath of
almost every past American war has brought expanded citizenship and
voting rights, from the Constitutional amendments of the post-Civil
War years to the most recent one, in 1971, lowering the voting age to
eighteen.

Yet,
even amid the escalating conflict of 1860, no presidential
candidate
called for anyone’s assassination or claimed large-scale voting
fraud. Then it was stand-ins—hotheaded congressmen,
intemperate editors—who threatened to “hang Republicans high”
and who, in response to Lincoln’s election, tried to secede from
America’s democratic project. Of such men, one journalist
observed, “it seems to be their endeavor . . . to browbeat and
bully into silence those whom they cannot persuade to go with them.”
Another wrote his brother from Alabama, “The people is apparently
gone crazy. I . . . have no idea what might be the end of it.”
Just so.